PubPeer: how the online Journal Club contributes for science correction

This post is dedicated to scientists, especially to those who have already encoutered, let's say, inconsistent or badly explained data in scientific articles, or methodologies which does not describe all details.

Which scientist never faced this?

And as you know well, this many times impacts our experiments, leading to delays and expenses with materials and reagents when we try to reproduce those papers.

In such cases, what do we do? I believe that the majority of researchers "put aside" their irreproducible data, and go in search for the next article that will "collaborate" in the research. And in this vicious cycle, we have the reproducibility crisis. Science should have mechanisms for being self-corrected. However, as many readers does not do anything about those articles, the reproducibility crisis only increases and the scientific correction is increasingly despised.

And what can we do to diminish such impacts? Nowadays the answer is simple: post comments on PubPeer. The online Journal Club is a platform that allows to find any article which has a DOI.

PubPeer homepage.

After find the paper, any person can post comments about it, following the commenting guidelines, of course. In summary, these orientations were established to avoid offenses and slander, profanity or comments not related to the article itself. The ideia of PubPeer is to provide a space where scientists can openly discuss, therefore it's recommended that the authors reply, as they are notified when a new comments is posted.

Example of a comment posted on PubPeer.

The proposal is really good, because it represents an opportunity for us to raise questions not only to the authors, but to all scientists interested in the paper. Our question can be the same of others, and posting about things we didn't understand or cannot be reproducible can benefit not only ourselves. However, if PubPeer is so efficient, why doesn't people talk about it so much? It's simple, because many people still does not know it, or are afraid of posting in this platform. Imagine a student contesting the work of a senior. I personally does not think this is bad, considering the correction of science should not be selective. However, early-career scientists are afraid of being harmed in their careers, if they raise any flaw in articles published by someone else more powerfull. And it's exaclty for protecting commenters that PubPeer gives the option of posting anonymously. In this case, the commenter is given a random name of a plant, and it's impossible to be identified.

I had chosen to post under my real name because I don't see any problem in being identified, I'm willing to "take some risks" working for correction of science.

Another very interesting thing is the extension that, installed in the browser, informs if an article present at the page you are visiting was commented on PubPeer.

PubPeer browser extension.

PubPeer has already brought many benefits to science, from identification of serious flaws, duplicated images, plagiarism, to articles corrected by the journals (for instance, errata or retraction). In some cases the own authors posts when observe something in their works (as I did for my first article, published in 2019).

Use PubPeer, it's free, it's important, and it's our obligation, as scientists, to join this kind of discussion. as long as we are sure about what we say in our comments (no accusations).